High Lonesome
by Barry Hannah
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barry HannahEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-09-11
ISBN: 0802135323
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of High Lonesome
Book Review: A Bad Blind Date
Summary: 2 Stars
Hannah's got a pretty stellar reputation, and yet, whenever I've browsed his books in the library or bookstore, they never quite grabbed me. However, lately, I've been getting a lot more satisfaction from short story collections than novels, especially when it comes to American authors. So when a friend lent me this collection of 13 Mississippi-set stories from Hannah, I dived right in instead of waiting my usual 6-12 months to start it. Once I pick a book up, it's 95% likely I'll finish it -- unfortunately this one fell into the 5%... I read five of the stories and started two others before finally putting it aside to return to my friends.
For whatever reason, my browsing instinct was dead-on -- I'm simply not in synch with Hannah's style at all. He's certainly got a certain distinctive mood all his own, kind of a grotesque minimalist Southern thing, but it never really hung together or engaged me. There are some great lines here and there, but the hunt just wasn't worth the effort. The characters tend to be the kind of eccentrics one often finds in such collections, but the stories they inhabit simply never got off the ground for me. Some of the characters traverse stories, and when this happens, there's a bit more texture, a bit more depth, but not much. Stories like "Snerd and Niggero", which reviewers all seem to love, just fell flat for me. Two men, a woman, some bawdy prose, she dies, they cope together. Blah. "The Ice Storm" left my consciousness the second I finished it. The one story I did like was "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis", which is a nice little epic about a boy's fishing adventure. My guess is that it's purely a matter of stylistic preferences, and that like a bad blind date, Hannah and I just weren't meant to click.
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